Sheffield Momentum defend Corbyn

There was a Momentum meeting in Sheffield yesterday to discuss the best way to defend Corbyn against those Labour MPs who are trying to remove him.

Around 200 people turned up to the meeting, which was a great turnout.

Peter and Rhea both addressed the meeting, with the latter’s speech talking about a fundamental change in society and the democratisation of the economy and the party and the need to fight for socialism. Unfortunately there was only time for 4 or 5 contributions from the floor.

We proposed a positive message of how Corbyn can win as long as he comes out fighting with bold socialist ideas, as well as raising the question of the deselection of MPs who refuse to support Corbyn.

We will be holding a stall in our ward with Momentum members to sign people up to the LP to defend Corbyn this Saturday.

A motion was passed at the end of the meeting in which we committed to supporting Corbyn. It would have been good to include the question of how we defend Corbyn against the right-wing, specifically a point about deselection. We proposed the following amendment which was enthusiastically supported by around a third of the room:

We condemn the PLP for holding a secrete ballot against Corbyn. There should be no more secret ballots as MPs should be held accountable to the membership. This means we demand the democratic right to have a mandatory reselctions process and deselections of MPs who don’t abide by the memberships will.

Clearly there is a huge anger among Momentum members. It seems that some people are worried about how a militant defence of Corbyn, including de-selections of right-wingers, will be portrayed in the media. But we should not be worried about this. The media have been against Corbyn from day one because it is owned and controlled by big business, whose dominance Corbyn and his supporters threaten. We should not be deciding our policy based on what the Labour Right and the super-rich media moguls want us to do. We should be taking our decisions based on what is necessary to defend the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party.

Overall it was an excellent meeting and encouraging to see so many people mobilised and ready to defend Corbyn, even at short notice. The mood of anger at the Right and enthusiasm for Corbyn is only going to increase over the coming days and weeks. We should use this to put radical socialist ideas at the heart of Corbyn’s Labour party.